Shares are up 20% premarket at $72.68, which incidentally is the deal’s premium.

Interestingly, the deal’s a 19% premium to the company’s all-time high of $60.91, which it hit on Monday. The stock’s been rising this year, along with everything else, but before you start wondering whether old Uncle Warren’s buying at the top, maybe losing his edge, this is a stock that in the summer of 2012 finally got back to its 1998 high around $54.

That’s 14 long, cold years lost in the condiment wars. This isn’t exactly a growth industry, but that’s the way Buffett likes it.

At $28 billion, the buyout would make it among the largest — if not the largest — deal in the food industry. The only one approaching that level is the famed $25 billion LBO of RJR Nabisco, which, adjusted for inflation, would eclipse the Heinz deal, but RJR, of course, included tobacco.

In recent memory, there was Kraft’s $19 billion Cadbury deal in 2010, but that’s about two-thirds of what Warren Buffett and 3G are paying for Heinz.

3G Capital isn’t exactly a household name like Heinz, or Warren Buffett for that matter, but the New York-based PE firm has a history with food and beverages: they took Burger King private in 2010 and orchestrated the 2008 Anheuser-Busch/InBev deal as well.

Buffett and the new owners pledged to keep the company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh, and to maintain its philanthropic endeavors.

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